Chicken Feet

As I look through job ads, I'm very much aware of the fact that the jobs I'm looking at now are the same types of jobs I was looking at in high school. I thought the point of going to college was to avoid having to perform menial labor and take minimum-wage jobs. That was my main motivation in even finishing college. Whenever I was frustrated with school or didn't know if I wanted to continue, I reminded myself of the cashiering job I had when I was 16. I never wanted to do that again. Not only did I have to deal with the general public and their germs (isn't it fun when you're forced to work with, or worse yet serve, someone with a really nasty, hacking cough), but I also had to deal with the crap they bought. They'd throw fifty-pound dog food bags up on the counter and get angry when I told them that my 98 pound body was not going to load that back into their cart - they'd have to do that themselves. But out of all the things I hated, the worst was chicken feet. Yes, people actually buy chicken feet. Why, I don't know, but they do. They come in packaging like normal chicken, with the styrofoam bottom and thin clear packaging over the top. The long, sharp-looking claws on the end of the dead, wrinkly feet would always pierce through the top of the packaging, ready to poke any unobservant bystander and spread their salmonella. It was nearly impossible to find a place to pick that nastiness up without being in danger of being contaminated by least one of the many claws that were sticking out. As an undergraduate, this was what I thought of to keep myself going, this was my motivation - I never wanted to see, let alone touch, a package of chicken feet again. My fear was that if I dropped out of college, I would be banished to a life of cashiering and the chicken feet it brought. If only I had known that a college degree could not save me from having to consider or even take this type of job again, I could have saved a lot of money on tuition.